Cliff Stearns: importation of radioactive waste. i want to thank mr. gordon for his leadership on this issue. i encourage my colleagues to support the bill, and yield back my time. the speaker pro tempore: the gentleman yields back. the gentleman from florida is recognized. mr. stearns: mr. speaker, i ask how much time i have left? the speaker pro tempore: 16 minus. mr. stearns: ok.

Cliff Stearns: i yield myself such time as i may consume. the speaker pro tempore: the gentleman is recognized. mr. stearns: i think if you try to look at this as a broad picture, around the world a lot of countries are actually building nuclear power plants and there are countries that are decommissioning these. there are currently 436 nuclear

Cliff Stearns: reactors worldwide with 53 under construction. china has 16 reactors under construction. so this renaissance is occurring. it's global. so, you know, i think if you're going to have companies that are involved with the construction and decommissioning of nuclear power plants and they want to say, ok, i want to bid, these

Cliff Stearns: countries will accept the bid from the united states but if the united states is limiting them in how they're getting rid of the low-level raoactive waste, it's going to put -- make it more difficult to make that company to compete. again, you know, this is not a serious problem. as far as i know, there has not been any indirect harm to

Cliff Stearns: individuals because of this. i obviously view this bill, the authors are doing this as a safety measure. and i respect that. but this low radioactive waste is used in smoke detectors as well as exit signs on the interstate. so the implementation of this bill is going to be more

Cliff Stearns: regulatory and the nuclear regulatory commission is already doing this. so why would we need this bill? and i think as pointed out earlier in my statement, we have so many other class b and class c waste that we really should be concentrating on and very low radioactive. so i think, mr. speaker, this